Books: Out of the Waxworks

THE GREAT PRINCE DIED (398 pp.)—Bernard Wolfe—Scribner ($4.50).

The life and death of Leon Trotsky, a kind of Marxist Macbeth, have been made into a novel by U.S. Author Bernard (The Late Risers, In Deep) Wolfe, who was one of Trotsky's aides in the years before the inevitable assassin caught up with him in his Mexico hideaway.

On some principle by which the names have been changed to protect the guilty, Leon Trotsky, whose real name was Lev Davidovich Bronstein, in this novel is called Victor Rostov. But there is no doubt that the book...